Bioware suffered friction among its Dragon Age and Mass Effect teams, according to a former developer.
When writing on social networks, the creator of Dragon Age and former main writer David Gaider has discussed their experiences in the study before their departure in 2016, and said that the staff working in the two largest franchises of the study “did not get along well.”
This was something that Gaider said he experienced personally when he moved to join the Mass Effect team while working on the unfortunate anthem, after completing the work in Mass Effect’s original trilogy.
“For a long time it was basically two teams under the same roof: the Dragon Age team and the Mass Effect team,” Gaider wrote. “Run differently, very different cultures, they may also have been two separate studies. And they did not get along.
“The company was aware of friction and attempts to fix it had been ongo [Anthem] equipment. The team didn’t love me there. At all.”
Gaider says that Bioware Management had specifically asked him to write a scientific fantasy story for Anthem, after the project had initially conceived as a “hard science fiction scenario” similar to aliens. And although Gaider says he was only following orders, his new colleagues apparently did not know why he was writing something they thought was “too dragon.”
“I kept receiving comments about how ‘Doo Dragon Age’ was and how everything I wrote or planned was ‘Dragon Age’ … the involvement is that * anything * like Dragon Age was bad,” Gaider continued. “And yet, this was a team in which I had to accept and act on all comments, so I ended up constantly it.”
“I will not go into details about the problems, except to say that it was clear that this was a team that did not want to make a role-playing game. They were very anti-RPG, in fact. However, they wanted me to greet my wand of magical writing and create a history of bioware quality without giving me any of the tools I would need to do that.”
Finally, Gaider started from Bioware after 17 years after a failed attempt to negotiate a position of creative director in another project after Anthem, and some “more Blunter words” about the probability that he succeeds outside the company if he resigned.
“I had no idea where I was going or what I was going to do, but I wanted to leave,” Gaider concluded.
Since he left Bioware, Gaider has passed the developer Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical in New Outfit Summerfall Studios, who launched a generally positive response in 2023. The next study project will be a demonic deck builder called Mallys.
Bioware continued the work in Anthem for several years, although the project was finally launched as a critical and commercial failure. Subsequently, the study subsequently launched Mass Effect: Legendary Edition in 2021, followed by Dragon Age: The Veilguard, which obtained positive criticism but mediocre sales.
A newly out of Bioware is now working only in the next Mass Effect, announced for the first time in December 2020.
